Solo Game & Research

So today is the first lesson back from the Christmas holiday and we’ve been given a quiz to recap what we’ve learned last term. Even though it was 10 questions long I failed in spectacular fashion. I managed to answer 2 and only because the were “what’s an integen? What’s a string?” Everything else I had no idea of. Coding is fun. Shortly after that we were given a brief of the maths things we would need to cover in the weeks to come. These were, and not limited to; Pythagoras, Trigonometry, Vector maths, Dot Product, Vector Product and Standard, Deviation and Variance. Now, anyone who knows me knows that I can’t do maths to save my life so I have no earthly idea how this is going to go.

Like I said, coding is fun.

Anyway, we were then told that we were to plan a simple 2D game that will allow us to develop our coding and maths skills. We’re to create some graphics, design some levels and then introduce said game through blog posts. Well, here goes.

In an earlier blog post I said I’d like to create a Double Dragon style game, well that’s exactly what I’ve decided to do. I’d sketched a design of how the screen would be laid out and rather than plan a set of levels/story etc, my current idea is to just produce one level. and if things go well with that, then I can always add more further into the project.

My main thinking at this point was the maths would happen with the reduction of health bars when characters are hit but I in reality, the maths part will probably be exercised throughout since maths is at the core of pretty much everything. Ant thinks this is a good, workable idea but for a first project, he thought the punching mechanics of the game would be too complicated; how big is the area around the fist which would count as a hit? Do both characters have to be on the same line for a hit to occur? What happens if two punch each other at the same time? Do both lose health? Does the one who threw the punch last lose and not the first? The variables just seemed too large and especially with what I’m able to do at present he has a point.

Guns were suggested as the bullets firing travel on one straight path making hit detection easy(er) and solve a lot of those issues above. I admit, its not what I wanted to have but I can see the benefits of it having only been doing this for a few months and Ant’s experience vastly outweighs mine so guns it is. With any luck, coding might sink in someday in the future and I’ll be able to make the fighting mechanics work.

This however, got me to thinking “what if this is a step too far too soon?” so I’d thought of trying something else a bit more basic. At least basic to me. So I’d Googled something like ‘simple games’ which spurred my thinking to Nintendo’s old Game & Watch series and I’d thought about doing a clone of their game ‘Fire’.

I ran this idea by Ant but the feedback I got wasn’t quite what I was expecting. He thought that this idea would concentrate too much on physics of the people being bounced off the blanket into the waiting ambulace/pool/air mat etc and it’d stray a bit off the point of the project – developing coding & maths skills. So for now, this is on ice and the creation of Double Dragon with guns is the choice.

So now I have to go and flesh out my idea more, create assets to use and hope to God something about coding sinks in this term so I can eventually begin to make my own games!

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